Talk:Zoë Rivas/@comment-11613594-20150110133623/@comment-25290273-20150111030611
You are very good at confounding the opponent's position by equivocating what they mean. But thankfully, I am skilled enough in dealing with people like you that I can effectively overturn the equivocations you create to distort what I say and discredit my argument. The first equivocation you make crops up right away when you claimed I saw the characters AS "nothing more than cinematographic elements of the show." As a direct analogy. In YOUR WORDS, in the correct context that you delivered them. What I actually suggested in MY comment was that it was okay to express criticism of them the same way on the basis that they are both creative expressions of the producers/directors of Degrassi, not as a result of some misguided belief that they are actually the same thing. An understanding of this nuance is essential to understanding my entire position, but since you have conflated what I meant in the first sentence of your reply, any hope I had that you would arrive at a correct interpretation of what I said is irretrievably lost before you've even introduced me to your actual claim. The second equivocation arises when you switch the emphasis of what I said in my comment in a way that changes the meaning of it. The emphasis in my statement "...discuss the characters...as though...they represent real people" was on the REPRESENT, not the "real." I even italicized it in my previous comment. Per your interpretation of what I said, with the emphasis on "REAL" (check your reply), I agree that what I said would be a non-sequitir because it would suggest that I've introduced a double-standard into the way I profess to regard what is real versus what is not. But per my interpretation of what I said, the way I'' intended it, I have expressed nothing unintelligible; an element said to be a ''representation of something is automatically understood not to be the thing itself, but merely a portrayal of the thing that is used to invoke the idea of what is being represented. And a representation of something can be evaluated for any number of reasons, by any number of criteria (including its quality, how well the author of it has portrayed it, how realistic it is, and so on). By virtue of these observations, it necessarily follows that I believe it's okay to remove Zoe FROM THE SHOW (whether she's killed off as I said in my initial comment, moved to a different country, or anything else) because I have determined (in my own opinion) that Zoe lessens the quality of the show as one particular creative expression among many others of Degrassi writers. It also follows that (as an implicit understanding contained in that corollary) that my opinion of Zoe as a creative expression IS my assessment of something that, indeed, affects the quality of the show. The missing element that you failed to take into account, the big picture that you overlooked (or outright ignored) about what I said was that when I say wish to see a character "killed off" a show (or more importantly, removed through whatever other means they choose), I do so not out of ill will toward the character himself (as a real person, if one is to perceive him that way) but merely as an acknowledgement of an ELEMENT that I wish to see GONE from a show. It will admit that it is a dehumanizing way to see these characters, but it is nonetheless a perfectly justifiable way to view FICTITIOUS characters of a TV show about a FICITIOUS universe, which compose the CREATIVE ELEMENTS of a show. Though I don't begrudge you for this, I certainly feel that it would be a lot nicer if you took care to represent my statements in a manner that's accurate before you attempted to dispute them.